Environmental Successes of the Bush Administration

Some new key environmental statistics you won't find reported by Greenpeace:

"Average vehicle emissions are dropping about 10 percent per year as the fleet turns over to inherently cleaner vehicles, including modern SUVs.

Ninety-four percent of the population is served by water systems that have reported no violations of any health-based standards.

There has been a 55-percent decline in toxic releases since 1988, even while total output of the industries covered by this measurement has increased 40 percent.

Despite most popular assumptions, U.S. air quality trends are found to be at least equal, if not slightly better, than in Europe."

(Thanks to WMD...awesome job!)

This will never be released broadly in mainstream media. Basically if you want real news you have to go to a blog these days. Mainstream media are all about agendas and story lines, needless to say this kind of factual information does not fit the liberal story lines!

This is when non-partisan folks would be taking a bow. The environmental groups deserve a tremendous amount of credit for the incredible improvements we are enjoying. Unfortunately, it is not in their best interest at this time to acknowledge that there have been improvements of this magnitude. They need to raise funds and prove they have a reason to exist. The aforementioned major media outlets can't acknowledge this information without making the Bush administration look good on the environment, not the story line, so we in the blogosphere have to post and hope the readers spread the word.

"Environmental Successes of the Bush Administration" and no it isn't a joke.

Comments

[James Healey]

Thanks for sharing these successes of Bush administration environmental policy. A couple of questions:

1)"Average vehicle emissions are dropping about 10 percent per year as the fleet turns over to inherently cleaner vehicles.

As older cars retire from service, wouldn't this improvement have happened regardless of who was president? Said differently, what specific actions did this administration take to achieve this success?

2) Ninety-four percent of the population is served by water systems that have reported no violations of any health-based standards.

How does this number compare to previous years? If 94% is a significant improvement over the value of this metric from 2000, then this is indeed a success.

3) There has been a 55-percent decline in toxic releases since 1988, even while total output of the industries covered by this measurement has increased 40 percent.

This is great news, but to be fair to your premise, how much have toxic releases declined since 2001, when George Bush took office? If it truly has declined specifically during the years of his stewardship, then I am pleased to hear of his great achievement.

4) U.S. air quality trends are found to be at least equal, if not slightly better, than in Europe.

I had understood that the Bush Administration had actively worked to loosen air quality standards over the last several years. While it's nice that US air quality is on par with Europe, is this something that occurred because of actions taken by the Bush Administration? A more fair question would be: what metrics of air quality have improved during the 8 years of Bush's stewardship of our environment? Surely there must be some objective metric of achievement in this area over the last 8 years?

I'd be pleased to hear your comments in response: jamesfhealey@MSN.COM

Best Regards
\Jim